Fish sauce is used in a lot of Southeast Asian cooking, especially Thai and Vietnamese. It has a nice salty-sweet flavor to it, and you use it very sparingly, like Anchovy paste. A little goes a long ways!

There are several brands of fish sauce, the best one I’ve found so far is called “Three Crabs” Good fish sauce should be the color of brewed tea. Anything darker (like the color of soy sauce) is a lower quality brand.

Chinese sausage is a wonderful ingredient. Its sweet, salty, slightly smoky. Unopened in its package, it will last 3 months refrigerated. After opening, wrap it up and refrigerate. The sausage will last for another month in the refrigerator. Dice the sausage into ¼” cubes. For the best flavor, start with a dry sauté pan or wok set on medium heat. Add sausage and turn to low. The fat will melt (render) and in 7 minutes, remove the sausage leaving the fat. This is where a ton of flavor is! Use this fat to fry the rest of the ingredients.

The sausage is smoked, preserved, dried and sold in packages of 10-12 links. The Chinese word for this is: “Lop Cheong”

I brought this sausage back home from a recent trip to California (to celebrate Chinese New Year with family). My mom drove us to a friend’s house to pick up a large bag of Lop Cheong. Her friend hand-makes these sausages without any artificial preservatives.

1. Marinate the Crab: Drain all the water from the can of crab meat. Marinate with list of ingredients above.

2. Fry Sausage, Crab & Eggs: Heat up your wok to medium-high. Add the Chinese sausage to the wok, turn the heat down to med-low. Cook until the sausage releases its fat – about 5 minutes. Remove sausage, leaving as much oil in wok as possible.

Turn heat to med-high. Add eggs to wok. Add crab to wok. Fry the mixture gently until eggs cooked through but still very soft. Remove, leaving as much oil in wok as possible.

3. Fry Rice: You should have about 1T of oil in the wok. If not, add cooking oil to the wok. Turn heat to high. Once the wok is hot, add scallions, stir fry for 15 seconds. Add the rice – breaking up as many chunks at possible.

Let the rice heat up in the wok. Add vegetables. Stir-fry until all is hot.

Add fish sauce, soy, salt & pepper

Add the Chinese sausage, egg/crab mixture. Stir fry until all ingredients are combined and steaming hot.